Title “No Stranger in Foreign Lands”: Francisco de Hollanda and the Translation of Italian Art and Theory

Description The Portuguese miniaturist and theorist Francisco de Hollanda (1517-84) is best known for Book Two of his Da Pintura Antiga (“On Ancient Painting”), a series of dialogues that feature Michelangelo and Vittoria Colonna in 1538. Almost as well-known but little discussed are his drawings from his years in Rome, carefully gathered into an album. This lecture proposes that the drawings were intended as a part of de Hollanda’s larger, theoretical project, which aimed to translate the ideas and art of ancient and Renaissance Italy to his native Portugal. The way in which the drawings were made and arranged suggests that they were visual, material counterparts to Hollanda’s treatise on art (Book One of Da Pintura Antiga) and the Roman dialogues. As a whole, the project aimed to demonstrate the versatility, virtuosity, and authority of Hollanda as agent of cultural translation for the Portuguese court.

Speaker Elena Calvillo is an Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Richmond, Virginia. Her research and writing have focused on artistic self-fashioning and imitative strategies in sixteenth-century papal Rome. She is broadly interested in theories of representation and cultural translation and brokerage. She is currently completing a book on the art of the miniaturist Giulio Clovio, a leading interpreter of Michelangelo, and has begun a second book project on artistic professionalization and cultural brokerage between Italy and Habsburg imperial centers. A collection of essays co-edited with Piers Baker-Bates on the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century practice of oil painting on stone supports will be published by Brill in early 2018.